Recently, I enjoyed a summer break in the South-West of Ireland. Paying a random visit to a tiny parish church by the ocean’s edge, the overpoweringly pungent smell of damp and mildew which
pervaded the building’s interior, assaulted our senses like the stench of rotting cabbages. The former Papal Nuncio to Ireland, Archbishop Charles Brown, spoke frequently about the green shoots of renewal which he discerned in the Irish Church. In this particularly far-flung corner of the emerald vineyard, we sensed mainly decline.